Landrieu refunds taxpayers for campaign flight

Sen. Mary Landrieu has refunded taxpayers $3,200 for a charter flight bill that was paid by her Senate office but should have been paid by her campaign.

CNN has the story, which appears to have its origins in a USA TODAY report about senators using charter flights for official travel on the taxpayers’ dime. That story noted that Landrieu spent $47,000 on charter flights, and USA TODAY provided a list of the trips to Landrieu’s office in seeking comment for the story.

According to CNN:

Landrieu’s campaign spokesman, Fabien Levy, said in a statement that the charter company mistakenly billed Landrieu’s Senate office instead of her re-election campaign. Levy said the campaign noticed the error a few weeks ago and asked the company to refund the Senate office and bill the campaign, which the company did. Levy said Landrieu’s re-election campaign paid for the flight August 4, almost nine months after the November 8 trip.

“We take our finances very seriously and are glad we caught the vendor’s mistake and were able to rectify the matter as soon as possible,” Levy said.

The campaign didn’t notice the mistake until July 29 … Levy told CNN that media scrutiny of Senate office expense reports spurred the campaign to review its travel records.

Worth noting here that the USA TODAY review also discovered that Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., had been improperly billed twice for a charter flight, and his office sought reimbursement from the charter company. So, thus far the charter flights story has netted U.S. taxpayers more than $5,000 in refunds. We shall resist the temptation to ask for a finders’ fee.

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